


Let's Do It

by Blake



Series: Cole Porter 30-day challenge [3]
Category: Cars (Pixar Movies)
Genre: M/M, Mentions of Racism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22369105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: The second time Sarge comes to Radiator Springs, he tells himself it’s to stop for gas.
Relationships: Fillmore/Sarge (Cars)
Series: Cole Porter 30-day challenge [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610263
Comments: 3
Kudos: 20





	Let's Do It

The second time Sarge comes to Radiator Springs, he tells himself it’s to stop for gas. He’s careful about where he stops for gas, wary of the rough glares and glove-compartment pistols of the interstate truckers with their American flags, and the white vacationing families who keep a twenty-foot radius from him, so blinded by the color of his skin that they don’t stop to think he almost died for them in the jungle. One of the two things he knows about himself after the war is to trust his instincts, and his instincts tell him there’s danger at every rest stop.

He drives to Flo’s place, his fingers numb as he pumps the gas, imagining asking _again_ if she has any food without meat or grease in it, and being told _again_ that his best bet is to go ask Fillmore. The purity of his disciplined vegetarian diet feels compromised. He hesitates too long before going in. He tells himself it’s to soak up the dry, dry, dry desert heat.

His boots clap on the tile when he walks into the diner. Flo looks up from the newspaper on the counter, tongue in her cheek and reminding him just as much as last time of a younger version of his mother, preserved in time and allowed to age without losing two sons and a whole lot more. He smiles, even though he knows his smile has a tendency to scare people.

“Hey stranger,” she calls over the echo of his footsteps and the jukebox. “Still just passing through?”

It’s then that he notices he’s not the only customer. There’s a pair of bony shoulders draped nearby and Sarge’s teeth remember the give of the flesh between them, and an unmistakable halo of thick, high hair, a perfect, resistant handful—but Sarge tries not to let himself remember that—splayed out flat across the bar.

Sarge takes a seat at the bar and orders a glass of ice water to combat the sweat of the dry desert heat.

When Fillmore lifts his head off the table and notices him, Sarge tells himself he didn’t mean for that to happen.

An hour later, the diner is full of people—a few locals, a few tourists, but nobody who stares at him hard enough that he notices—and Fillmore is sitting on the stool beside him, stealing sips from his coffee cup once in a while. Each time his lips press to the porcelain, Sarge’s breath hitches, remembering with painful clarity the terrible give, like an overripe fruit that brings reprieve in the starvation of the poisonously barren jungle.

Flo will only let Fillmore smoke tobacco in here, despite all his loose-limbed pleading, his skinny frame writhing in his seat until his shirt rides up to expose the coarse black hairs across his pink-brown stomach, stringy arms reaching across the bar like things that need to be pinned down. He blows cigarette smoke out across Sarge’s face, and Sarge holds his breath, because discipline is one of the two things he knows about himself, alongside trusting his instincts. 

“Man,” Fillmore exhales on a cloud of smoke. Sarge holds his breath. “Do you really buy all that shit? That patriotic shit? That you served our country?”

Sarge thinks of the screamers in the hospital and the way the scar in his lower back itches every time he passes a man who’s shaking on the street. He can’t live in the cities, because those men are everywhere. “I believe I did what was right. I believe what I have to.”

Fillmore laughs more smoke in his face. Sarge rubs a hand over his own shaved scalp, a comforting sensation, so much more familiar than telling his secrets to someone who only mocks them. “So you _know_ you’re lying to yourself?” Fillmore’s words come out slow, despite the nicotine and caffeine.

“You really buy all that white-man bullshit?” Sarge takes the cigarette only to point at him with it. He was drafted just as all his brothers were raring for war against their own country, and when he came back, he found his community fizzled out like day-old soda. “Peace, love, and LSD?”

Fillmore looks at him for a second of total stillness, and then giggles, taking his cigarette back. “You should try it sometime,” he threatens.

“Which part?” something in Sarge blurts out before his discipline stops him. Fillmore, and everything that’s happened with him, strains the boundaries of what Sarge knows about himself.

Fillmore side-eyes him, his eyes golden-brown, the same dead-leaf color of his skin, under the thick curtain of his mold-black lashes. “I’ve got an idea of where we could start.”

Flashes of memory keep pinching Sarge’s spine, as they sit here. The scrape of Fillmore’s lazy three-day beard. The salt flooding his mouth from the sweat beading that taut skin. The clutching burn in his hips from thrusting. The spill of limbs across the bed when Sarge woke up earlier than usual before dawn for his normal, regular, steady five-mile run. It’s torture, like sitting in ice water, letting the ice infiltrate new parts of you until it’s pierced your very self.

Sarge turns in toward his coffee, closing himself off and aiming his thoughts at the ten hours remaining of his drive.

A hand lands on his thigh, hot-and-cold through the fabric of his cargo pants. His vision goes fuzzy, like it did last time, when Flo had sent him to the lean-to on the edge of town, looking for some natural food and losing a whole night instead. “Let’s do it,” Fillmore’s barely-there voice murmurs, like something that needs to be pinned down.

“Let’s do what?” Sarge demands, because he doesn’t want to admit anything to himself and because he wants Fillmore to find the fortitude to want to live and say what he wants and fight for it.

Fillmore’s hand creeps up his thigh, and up, and up. Sarge’s stomach drops out from under him, every limb goes tingly, and he’s hard under the playful squeeze of that hand. “You know,” Fillmore breathes, sliding off the stool enough to hide his hand from the rest of the diners. “Fall in love,” he whispers with his soft, giving lips against the shell of Sarge’s ear. Sarge can feel the moment those lips arc into a smile against his ear.

The bitterness of his coffee cakes the back of his throat as Fillmore leaves, because the thing is, Sarge’s instincts are telling him _exactly_ where he can find that charming, infuriating bastard.


End file.
